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It took more than 40 years just for them to get together each Friday with a trained counselor to talk about it, and sometimes laugh about it, and sometimes cry about it.

All are in their 60s; most of them grandparents and retired. They come from Chester and Rock Hill and Fort Mill. Most have ailments from Agent Orange, the defoliant used in Vietnam.

All of them have what is termed PTSD - post traumatic stress disorder. It took more than 40 years for them to get diagnosed and treated for that killing they did and saw.

"We can talk about things together that you just can't talk about with other people," said Larry Archie, who enlisted in the Marines off the mill hill because his uncle, Sam Faile, had done the same thing. Both are in the group.

Archie came back from Vietnam and the hell that it was and "drank every day until 1990."

Faile, now 68, came back to Rock Hill after the war, couldn't fit back into this world, and left for Hawaii and California. He stayed away for 40 years.

The men talk about the cruelty they had for wives and children over repressed feelings, their anger at how veterans were treated, the isolation they found after being taught before Vietnam to be nice - then to go to Vietnam and kill.

In the present, soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan get heroes' welcomes. These guys got nothing.

"I am still angry about it," said Joe Gammon, 67, an Army helicopter gunship pilot.

"We didn't get any parade; we didn't get anything after doing what we did and saw that was so horrible."

Alan Hunter of Chester, 63, was in combat in Vietnam's central highlands and somehow lived through all the killing.

"And until now," he said, "I held it all in all these years - trying to deal with it."

Somehow, Marine David Wooles, 66, survived months of walking point for infantry in rice paddies and jungle. "Then I was shot in the head by an AK-47 assault rifle."

He spent a year in a naval hospital.

Tom Autry, 66, was in the Air Force fuel specialty. His specialty was death.

Another guy, Army reconnaissance specialist Dempsey Aragon, 63, went out to the enemy, behind the enemy, and called in the bombs. He killed unknown numbers.

Ed Miller, Army too, age 65, a "river rat" killing the enemy along the canals and Mekong River as a young man who barely had to shave.

And Dennis Dunn, the comedian of the group at age 63, who says, "I was just a grunt."

A grunt who had to kill or be killed. Whose buddies died and who now has to deal every day with survivor's guilt.

These guys do not want to hear politicians or pundits talk about wars and why wars are fought. Most think the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were mistakes and the troops need to be brought home.

Wars do not win political battles, say these guys who ought to know.

"It is guys like us who go fight these damn horrible wars," said Wooles, with a head wound to prove it.

There was a recent Friday this group missed. These guys, strangers before the counseling sessions, started going to breakfast together and hanging around together.

Then nine of them - Archie, Faile, Gammon, Hunter, Wooles, Autry, Aragon, Miller and Dunn - decided to go to Washington, D.C., and see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

The Wall.

The wall with those 58,267 names of the dead on it.

They pooled their money and rented a van. David McFiggins, 62, Army, another in the group who couldn't go see the wall, wrote a poem about the trip and why it was important.

These guys found themselves in that wall, more than 40 years after they had lost part of themselves.

Each man, reflected off that wall, found names of friends who died.

Joe Gammon, that 67-year-old grandfather, said out loud that day: "Why are all those names on there? Why aren't we up there? Why did so many die?"